Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents. Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents.
I hadn’t rotated the site banner for a while. This month we have a scene from Fagan Park , which I explored with my in-laws earlier this month around Hornsby Shire in Sydney. It was stunning. As always, I generated a pixilated image with dithering to render it as though it came from an early 1990s CD-ROM. This time I posterised it down to monochrome, then applied a teal cast. I had some feedback on my last banner that it was too “busy”, which made the overlaid text harder to read....
It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Someti...
I am sorry to announce that the message.casa service will soon be closing. 2026-10-25 9:40 Some people have taken advantage of the service’s anonymity to send threatening messages that have been classified as terrorist in nature by governmental agencies. Moderation, which I had hoped would be a one-off, is becoming very difficult to manage. It is no longer possible to create new accounts on the platform, and it will be permanently closed on 31 December 2026. For your information, the reput...
Hooman. I believe it is dinner time. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Hooman. I believe it is dinner time. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ ...
The Great Day of His Wrath, by John Martin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at minimum lot sizes, Boeing’s next 737 MAX, Fervo short sellers, Figure AI’s training data, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I’m working on a piece about manufacturing isotopes that should be o...
Since learning about the effects of high CO2 concentration on attention and cognitive performance—especially at levels much higher than 2000ppm—I've started monitoring CO2 and other air quality indicators in my house, at my studio, and even on the road. I have a few other air quality monitors I'll be covering in the future, but today I wanted to focus on one I only heard about in the comments on a recent video tearing down a cheap no-name 'Air Quality Detector' from Amazon . Since l...
aosa : source for the website of The Architecture of Open Source Applications . archive : a GitHub repository with the remains of old projects. asimpy : source for a discrete event simulation package I wrote. bib : PDFs of 1800 papers, of which I’ve actually read about half. bin : little software tools I’ve cobbled together. books : PDFs of books I’ve bought. bram : source for Jon Udell’s agent management tool . catmaid : source for the Collaborative Annotation Toolkit...
I’ve been working as a fractional CMO and enterprise SEO consultant for over 2 years now. So yes, I’m going to spend the next 1900+ words convincing you how colossally stupid it would be for you to hire me. Or any other fractional CMO. What You Actually Get When Hiring a Fractional CMO You may think you’re getting a third of someone’s time at a third of the price. You are not. It’s more like 15% of the time at 50% of the price. First, the full-time CMO baseline...
A lot of software spends its time mapping strings to values. A web server must identify the HTTP method ( GET , POST , …). It must recognize header names. A URL parser must recognize the protocol ( http , https , ftp , …). A compiler must recognize keywords. In C++, the default approach is to put the strings in a std::unordered_map . std :: unordered_map methods = { { "GET" , Method :: GET }, { "POST" , Method :: POST }, { "PUT" , Method :: PUT }, { "...
When I started the Wonders of Web Weaving project , I knew I wanted the technical design of the website to be web-first. This meant that the website would be the home of the project, where all episodes are published, publishing an RSS feed that people could use to listen to episodes. In this post I am going to discuss a few of the technical decisions I made as I designed the project website. Site architecture I wanted to have a separate website for the episodes, as opposed to using my mai...
Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1 One of my common topics is the history of nuclear weapons . The "atom bomb" is a rich vein of history because its impact has been as much cultural as technical. Dramatic depictions like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer...
A huge problem I encounter with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is that there are thousands of cards in the game (around 33000 unique cards as of the time of writing). Depending on the format you play, you may be required to select a limited subset of these cards to play with. A common social format is the Cube draft or Cube. You and a group select and refine ~300-700 cards to create a custom set. While many players enjoy the process of selecting and refining every single card, I usually know a few...
Bryan Cantrill has a great line from a talk where he cautions against anthropomorphizing 1 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. I think it’s also a mistake to treat any tech company like a person. Here’s the full quote: You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower does...
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious 1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out there. If I didn't know Malis and didn't look into it, I would just assume that pgrust was another vibe slopped project that's never going to work. But I know Malis well enough to tr...
Hello, Welcome to another Friday. This week marks exactly 2 years since the Space Age release . 2.1 Stable After a long summer in experimental, 2.1 is now marked as stable. Thank you to everyone who played the experimental, reported bugs, and gave us feedback. A lot of the changes and tweaks since the first 2.1 release came directly from your reports. We took this opportunity to update our classic Factorio trailer one last time. As ...
Following our blog on Autonomy Factories , this is the second in our series exploring autonomy. An unmanned aircraft is tracking a vehicle during an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission. The vehicle disappears beneath the tree line. As the aircraft searches the surrounding terrain, its communications link is disrupted and the operator loses contact. The operator can no longer intervene, but the mission must continue. The aircraft’s mission autonomy software, or autonomou...
Mathematically speaking, democracy is next to impossible. That may sound like the premise of a Silicon Valley billionaire’s six-hour podcast, but it’s actually a statement about a remarkably stubborn problem: How do you translate a group of individual preferences into a single choice? In 1785, the French mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet discovered that a majority can… Source Mathematically speaking, democracy is next to impossible. That may sound like the premise of a ...
By Praneeth Yenugutala , Victor Dusa , Anastasia Samoilova , Megan Ren , Justin Wei , Marcelo Mayworm At Netflix, data and machine learning practitioners run millions of workloads each day across orchestration systems and compute engines such as Titus, Spark, Trino, and Druid. On peak days, roughly 100,000 workloads fail. When workloads fail, the failure itself is only the beginning. Someone still needs to find the useful signal in several logs, decide whether the cause sits in their code...
(Lance and Bill did a vidcast about the OpenAI Document Drop. See here . My spellcheck thinks that vidcast and OpenAI are not words.) The Metric TSP problem is TSP where, for all vertices \(x,y,z\), \(w(x,z) \le w(x,y) + w(y,z) \). In 1976 Christofides and Serdyukov (independently of each other) showed that there is a poly time algorithm for a 1.5-approx to Metric TSP. Some people thought the 1.5 could be improved. Some people thoug...
Thought I’d make a quick blog post about some weird behavior I’m seeing on iOS 27 and Dynamic Island live activities, that I initially thought was restricted to the Duo, but turns out affects everything. Yay. Maybe this post can save some others some time, and hopefully Apple can fix it. Long story short, ever since iOS 16.1 introduced “Live Activities”, where we can display handy little widgets in the Dynamic Island, there’s been a bunch of different configurations for showing thing...
After hiking up to the end of the ridge, it was now time to scout the initial part. The starting point is some 25km east of where I parked the car last time around, at the parking spot of the Italian ossuary in the lovely town of Kobarid. The plan is to walk my way up till the beginning of the ridge, reaching Starijski Vrh at the foothills of Mount Stol, the highest point of the entire ridge, at 1673 meters. The reason why I’m doing this hike is that I read conflicting information abou...
How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities. How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.
A forlorn businessman resting his head against a wall beside a window. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio, via Pexels. In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-89078 for the project Ruby , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a double free in Ruby's Onigmo regular expression parser when parsing fails after an alternation, allowing memory corruption and potential remote code execution in applicat...